Rolldabeats (formerly known as Tarzan) is the D&B database on the net including infos on all tracks, artists and labels. Check it out and support their work on the Forum !
The database originally started out as a list of the music I kept on my computer. After starting out as a plain text file I made the switch to an Excel sheet soon after so that all entries could be sorted by label and catalogue number. Because of the great internet connection I had at the time I decided to use that to fill some of the gaps. As the list grew I began to add more information about the releases. Year and side names were the first, then a while later, information about the format and number of vinyl was added.
Around the end of the summer in 2001 I decided to put the information online somehow. I had been adding information to the Excel sheet for over five years and people were asking more and more about it. Before then I had never done anything with XHTML, PHP, MySQL or any language what so ever and it took some time to learn how to use them before the site was ready for launch.
Just before Christmas 2001 Tarzan went live at http://tarzan.spoox.org. The name Tarzan was just something I came up with at the time. I Never expected the site to get as popular as it has and over the years have been shocked by the huge number of visitors the site has received. The guestbook on the site became a great way of having visitors tell me about information that was missing from the site. There were plans for a form for automating this process, but I have to admit this is still unfinished.
In November 2002 a forum was added, which eventually replaced the guestbook. By this time the database had extended, not only in number of releases, but also the amount of information stored on each release. Beside the forum relatively small visual changes were made to the web interface. Label scans had been added, with over 5,000 in the database at the time of writing.
Now in February 2005 we are finally ready for the next step. After months of planning and hard work Tarzan is dead…long live rolldabeats. I have wanted the site to have its own .com domain name for a long time. However, finding the new name for the site was harder than I thought it would be. Luckily a lot of people sent in suggestions so we picked one and now rolldabeats.com is ready for business.
The intention of the new site was to create a better looking site but keeping the layout simple and easy to use. Tarzan was praised for its simplicity and hopefully rdb makes it just as easy, if not easier, to access all the information sortedin the database. This is the first version of rolldabeats and we have so much more planned. You will notice extra features appearing over time and any little errors will be ironed out as the site progresses. Any feedback on the new look or the site in general can be emailed to us or posted up at the forum, we are always interested in what our users have to say about the site whether it is good or bad!
– Thijs (Feb 2005)
Tarzan or RDB – no matter the name of it.. Massive work, You make the tunes have their soul, their roots.. Don’t You ever stop. Tarzan just rolls da beats now!
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